Karnataka Assembly Election results: Congress' local campaign bulldozes BJP's national pitch

In its rout, the BJP has been stung by its lack of strong local faces or local issues as part of the campaign narrative, said leaders of the state unit

A “double-engine” promise. A polarising campaign based on its traditional Hindutva plank — this time propped up by a Hindi film and a Hindu god. And a gamble on 75 new faces... But nothing could save the BJP from a crushing defeat in Karnataka, the only state in South India where the party has a sizeable footprint.

In its rout, the party has been stung by its lack of strong local faces or local issues as part of the campaign narrative, said leaders of the state unit.

While the Congress ran a very local campaign, the BJP’s canvassing centred on rallies by national leaders, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi holding over 20 rallies and Home Minister Amit Shah as many as 30 rallies. Party president J P Nadda and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath also campaigned in the state.

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Modi urged the voters to watch the film The Kerala Story, and sought to project the Congress’ proposal to act against the Bajrang Dal as an insult to Bajrang Bali (Lord Hanuman). But they were not enough to convince the voter amid mounting anti-incumbency against the party’s state leadership.

The party’s messaging that centred on national issues did not resonate with the Karnataka voter, a BJP parliamentarian told DH.

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“The Congress picked the Amul vs Nandini plank, but no one spoke about it in the last week of campaigning. In a similar vein, the BJP’s raising of issues like the Bajrang Dal ban did not help the party, except for a few seats in the Udupi-Mangaluru region,” the leader said, wishing to remain anonymous.

Some of the steps to replicate its successes in states like Gujarat — like fielding 75 new faces, or changing the chief minister midterm — failed to work. Sixty-one of the new faces lost the elections. And the party not highlighting the sitting CM, Basavaraj Bommai, during its campaign showed that it was uncomfortable with its own leadership.

In fact, a former MLA said that after Yediyurappa’s exit from the top job, the party’s central leadership has been mostly running the show in the state. The lawmaker said that, in a telling moment, as it became increasingly clear that the party was staring at a colossal defeat, the octogenarian leader addressed the press and accepted the party’s fate.

“For a man who had to step aside in the middle of his term, Yediyurappa was one of the first and among a handful of leaders to do so, while leaders like Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and general secretary Arun Singh (both state in-charges) were not even in Bengaluru,” the former MLA said.

Political analyst Radhika Ramaseshan said the party miscalculated when it assumed that Yediyurappa was only a Lingayat leader.

“The BJP did a mistake in sizing up Yediyurappa; he has moved beyond being a caste leader and was later seen as a formidable face of the farming community. CM Bommai simply could not cultivate a base beyond the Lingayat community,” Ramaseshan said.

Local leaders said the national leadership’s lay say on tickets was unhelpful, too.

More than 14 meetings were held in Delhi for ticket distribution, and one of the key faces from the state unit who coordinated tickets — national general secretary C T Ravi — lost his seat. “The third list of the party, one can safely say, was one of the key wrongdoings of the campaign,” the former MLA mentioned above said.

Ramaseshan said the south is a region that the party has not been able to breach because of the issues that were being raised.

“The state, in fact, lost its identity under the BJP rule and the affairs of the party were over-centralised,” she said.